Duke

Duke wasn’t a particularly smart dog, but he was kind of fun to have around. Like most any dog he had a natural distain for cats, although with us living in the woods of New Hampshire there weren’t many that survived long enough to entertain Duke. Despite several intimate encounters, he never did learn those very fuzzy black cats with broad white stripes and a waddle to their walk weren’t cats at all.

Time after time I’d smell Duke headed home long before he arrived. After sticking his nose up another skunk’s butt it’d take him an hour or two of plowing his face in the grass before he could see clear enough to find the way home. By that time the aroma would already have announced his pending arrival, as he slunk toward the house with head hung low to the ground with that sheepish I-guess-I-screwed-up-again look on his face.

He didn’t get much sympathy from me, and knew I wouldn’t even consider petting him for three days, let alone allowing him in the house. Without fail, four days later we’d be outside, he’d see another fuzzy black cat waddling across the driveway and bolt off after it. Skunks were one thing, but he had the same repetitious problems with porcupines.

I got to know the symptoms well, a full bowl of food untouched for two days and no Duke. That could only mean one thing. He’d gotten another face and tongue full of quills and couldn’t eat. I could understand him getting quills in his nose as he was forever sticking it up something’s butt, but did he have to go and lick the barbed little critters as well.

He never returned with a just a few quills in a couple of places, but 20 or 40 of them covering his entire face. What’d he do, try biting the porcupine in retaliation. Like I said, Duke wasn’t very bright. I could take a couple out, but some 40 quills necessitated yet another $100 trip to the vet’s.

My finances were fairly tight the day my father called me at the police station where I was working to tell me Duke had returned from another three-day absence, this time being the most grand encounter of all, with his legs, paws, head, face and tongue looking like a scraggily whisk broom made of quills.

“I can take a couple of quills out, but not hundreds of them,” my father said over the telephone. “I’ve already called the vet’s (whom by then I should have had on retainer), and he said the dog would have to be anesthetized in order to remove that many quills, with cost ranging upwards of $150-200.

“What do you want to do?” Dad asked. “If you want to pay the bill I’ll take him to the vet’s, if you don’t have the money then he can’t live like this, especially given the condition he’s in now. So, if you want I can take him out back and shoot him.”

“Give me about 30 minutes to think it over, and I’ll call you back,” I said.

I had a prisoner I was booking on a DWI charge. Not a problematic guy, just, like most drunks, rather obnoxious and mouthy.  Nevertheless, he was a real man’s-best-friend kind of guy, and empathized with my plight. Like a governor deciding whether to stay a condemned man’s execution, I balanced Duke’s favorable traits against the bottomless pit of vet bills I’d been throwing cash into during the last couple of years, and the odds that he’d repeat his crime. Financially, Duke had caught me at a bad time; I was ready to sign this dog’s death warrant.

Although I wasn’t pleased with my decision to kill my dog, the positive result was that much like my cruiser going from 0 to 60mph in 16 seconds, my prisoner went from mouthy and overly obnoxious to polite and respectful at much the same speed. He’d become rather quite and slunk down in his chair as I dialed the telephone number to deliver the execution order.

“I’ve already taken care of it,” my father said before giving me an opportunity to announce my decision. “I took ‘em out.”

A certain rage overcame me. Sure, I was calling to deliver an execution order, but this was my dog, thus it was rightfully my decision whether he was to be shot, or as we say in cop lingo “Take him out.”

 “You know, he was my dog,” I chastised. “You could have waited until I called you back, it’s only been a few minutes.”

“Something had to be done, and done right away,” my father said. “The dog was suffering something awful.”

There wasn’t any sense in getting angry over the telephone, especially since the deed had already been done. Stifling my anger, it must have been the cop in me that asked the unnecessary “What did you use?” wondering if my father had used the pistol or the rifle.

“A pair of pliers,” he said, sounding still winded from his efforts.

“Yikes… that’s awful cruel,” I said. “Wouldn’t it have been just a tad more humane to have simply shot him rather than beat him to death with a pair of pliers, or did you just clamp them around his throat and squeeze until he stopped breathing.”

 “Why’d you use a pair of pliers,” I asked.

“Because I wasn’t about to use my hands,” he said.

“Oh great, you won’t choke him to death with your bare hands but you’ll beat him senseless with a pair of pliers,” I scolded.

Following my half of this conversation, the prisoner became very quiet, even beginning to break a sweat across his brow.

“What the hell are you talking about,” my father asked.

“Well excuse me, but I think it’s rather tacky to use a pair of pliers to kill a dog when a rifle is quite handy,” I said.

“You moron,” my loving father replied. “You really need to find yourself another line of work. It was the quills I took out, not the dog.”